Search Results
Below are your search results. You can also try a Basic Search.
(03/20/03 5:00am)
We should ban you from watching MTV." My roommate has come home to find me, once again, a drooling blob on the couch, my dog next to me, watching Sorority Life.
Hi, my name is Alex, and I'm addicted to reality shows on MTV. Sure, it may not seem like much to some of you with missing septums, but for me, it's a dirty, shameful secret, and it is one that is ripping my life apart.
I consider myself an intelligent, thoughtful person. In middle school, I read Camus for fun. In high school, it was Marx. I sought out knowledge everywhere I could. Of course, I never had a TV in my room until I came to college. Now, I don't read anymore, I don't do my schoolwork, I don't go to class on time, I don't go to work on time. I just sit and watch MTV.
My fellow addicts talk about a moment of clarity: that moment when a light from heaven comes down and says, "I don't think she realizes that I am Puck." Or at least that's what my voice said. Of course, my voice also had mud painted all over his face. I have weird voices in my head.
One weekend, I realized that I had to catch up on all the reading I hadn't done this semester. Coincidentally, it was the same weekend as the True Life marathon. Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about. You know about the guy who got calf implants. And the really fat playa with the girlfriend at fat camp and the girl who lost like 5 pounds, even though she wasn't that fat to begin with, and then went to go see this guy she liked who still thought she was fat. I sat on my couch the whole weekend and watched. I'm in this one class, English 155, called "Writing in the Documentary Tradition," and I thought about emailing my professor to tell him about the new documentary form that MTV had invented. But then that one Italian guy who was getting married started screaming at the limo driver who was late, and I ordered pizza.
When it was time for the Sorority Life finale, I gathered a few friends in front of the big screen in our house and I screamed at the the sisters who didn't want to initiate the pledges. When Skippy used the little plastic boats to ask the girl he secretly loved out on a date, I laughed with her as she laughed on the inside, and when Skippy cried, I cried a little too.
Oh Flora, your fall through the window as your housemates had a threesome in the shower was comedic genius! Oh Stephen and Irene, your fights and slaps and teddy bear throws will captivate me in my old age! Oh Alton and Irulan, why don't you get together for good and make us all happy? Oh Taildaters, your witty pages occupy my afternoons! Oh Sharon and Ozzy and Jack and Kelly and Dill, why can't my family be like yours? Oh Tami and David, I'll watch you tear that sheet off again and again!
And one day I know that I will sit down at one of my meetings, and when I look to my left, Ruthie will be there, smiling at me, clean and sober. And it will all be alright.
(02/28/03 5:00am)
Three days before the Republican National Convention nominated George W. Bush for president, Philadelphia police raided the headquarters of the Spiral Q Puppet Theater, at 13th and Sansom. The organization, along with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Asian-Americans United, was working to put together puppets and other props for protesters to carry in the demonstrations planned for the convention.
A few days later, protesters and members of Spiral Q, thinking that the city had already made its pre-emptive strike, gathered at 40th and Haverford to prepare new puppets for the day's protests. However, in the early afternoon, mounted police surrounded the building, claiming that they possessed contraband -- handcuffs and chains that the protesters were going to use to lock themselves together. Police dropped from helicopters onto the roof, while Matthew "Mattyboy" Hart, the 28-year-old founder of Spiral Q, was on the phone with the media and members of the City Council, working to end the standoff. It took hours, as the police waited for a search warrant until 4 p.m., in the end, not finding anything. But the sides eventually reached an agreement. "The cops lied to us," Hart says now. "They said that we would be released if we left the building." Instead, about 80 activists were loaded onto police pickup vans, schoolbuses painted blue. Hart considered it the end of his puppeteering days and applied for and received a fellowship to finish his bachelor's degree in geography/urban studies and cultural anthropology at Temple University.
(02/06/03 5:00am)
It is midnight on a Sunday in Philadelphia. It can't be more than 30 degrees outside, but Sticman and M-1 are outside with their jackets off, posing for Mugshots magazine. They have just finished a concert, but the two vogue for the camera, clearly practiced at it, punching, kicking and jumping. "It's cold as a motherfucker!" Sticman screams at one point, "anything for the struggle!"
The two rappers, who together form the incendiary hip-hop group Dead Prez, look anything but the image of rappers on MTV, stuck in the dingy alley behind the Theater of the Living Arts, their only jewelry the red, black and green wristbands that M-1 wears. A few people mill around, activists invited backstage by Sticman, who has angered the club's bouncers by inviting anyone who wanted to talk back. The shoot finally over, the two put on their jackets and pound on the back doors to the club, which are locked. "Yo, is this the door we came out of?" M-1, looking over his shoulder, shouts to Stic. Stic turns to me. "You got a tape recorder? Let's walk and talk."
Dead Prez was in Philly that night on the Lyricist Lounge tour, going around the country with Tahir, Killer Mike and a rotating cast of locals in each city. They are touring behind Turn Off the Radio, their new album that is not an album, but a mixtape, the follow up to their 2000 debut, Let's Get Free. "It's a mixtape, like, pow!" says Sticman. "It's some hood shit. Shit, like, just takeovers, like we be doing that all the time, just sitting around all the time, changing the words singing Billie Jean and flippin' your shit around." Stopped for a moment in the lobby of the theater, he breaks into song, mimicking Billie Jean. "And we was like, boom! Let's do that. Hip hop shit." The mixtape is just that, takeovers of classic hip-hop songs like Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy," with revolutionary lyrics adapted onto them. "It was all a dream, started organizing in my late teens, Huey P. and Malcolm X who I wanna be..."
That revolutionary political philosophy is not just the mantra of the band -- it is the driving force behind it. M-1 and Sticman formed Dead Prez while they were organizing for the Uhuru movement, a black nationalist party. Since then, they have worked to bring a political education to the masses, always infusing their lyrics with their politics. It is a move that has kept them off MTV and the radio, but they persevere. "What we relating," says Sticman, as he is hustled out to a waiting van, "is education. We say fuck they schools, and let's get a real education. We got love in the hood, know what I mean? We the poor people. When we speak, we are the masses. They tryin' to reach the masses. We are the masses"
(11/21/02 5:00am)
Georges Perrier, owner and head chef of three of Philadelphia's finest restaurants, is a hard man to get hold of. Perrier, who opened his flagship restaurant, Le Bec Fin, in 1970, is a celebrity chef, (one of the first), and his staff treats him as one -- which means that it can take a long time to schedule an interview. But there's a good reason for that: after 30 years of pioneering gourmet dining in Philly, he is a minor deity in some city circles. Despite a reputation for a hot temper, especially with journalists, he is affable, an incredible self-promoter and, most of all, a devout, single-minded perfectionist.
(07/18/02 4:00am)
Mick Jagger once said he didn't want to be playing "Satisfaction" when he was 40. As Jerry Hall will tell you, the man's a liar. Some bands age gracefully, while others, well, don't, refusing to admit that they can't continue to make the same music album after album. After all the Red Hot Chili Peppers have been through in their 17 year history, with nine albums, seven guitarists, and four drummers, you might think that they'd have trouble aging. You'd be wrong.
(06/13/02 4:00am)
In the short span of a few months, two female African-American singers -- who make reasonably similar, soulful music -- have released new CDs. One is a celebrity, one is a relative unknown. One has, according to some, already passed the peak of her short career, while the other has yet to reach the peak of what promises to be a successful stint in the industry. One is Lauryn Hill, formerly of the Fugees, whose first album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, skyrocketed to the charts amidst critical acclaim, and the other is Jaguar Wright, a member of Philly's own NuSoul movement, who first came to prominence as a backup singer on Jay-Z's "Unplugged" album.